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Chapter 4 Demand and Supply 75 What’s a Price Bubble? A Story of Housing Prices According to data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the average price of a U.S. single-family home rose about 1–3% per year in the first half of the 1990s; 3–5% per year in the second half of the 1990s; 7–8% per year in the early 2000s; and more than 10% per year from late 2004 to early 2006. Although no one seriously expected price increases of 10% per year to continue for long, what happened next was still a shock. Although certain metropolitan areas or states had seen declines in housing prices from time to time, there had not been a nationwide decline in housing prices since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But housing prices started falling in 2006, and through much of 2008 and 2009, housing prices were falling at a rate of 4–5% per year. Of course, these national averages understate the experience of certain parts of the country where both the boom and the bust were much larger. Economists refer to this chain of events as a price “bubble.” Remember that one possible reason for demand to shift is expectations about the future. If many people expect that housing prices are going to rise in the future, demand for housing will shift to the right—thus helping the prediction of higher prices come true. For a time, a cycle of expecting higher prices, increases in demand, and resulting higher prices can be self-reinforcing. But this process cannot last forever. At some unpredictable time, many people recognize that the expectations of ever-higher future prices are unrealistic, at which point demand shifts back in the other direction and the price bubble deflates. Price bubbles are not just observed in housing: they are also seen from time in markets for collectible items, and in stock markets. The bursting of the price bubble in housing—which happened in many countries around the world, not just the United States—has caused great economic difficulties. Those who owned homes watched the value of this asset decline. Some of those who borrowed money to buy a house near the peak of the bubble found a few years later, after the bubble had burst, that what they owed to the bank was much more than the house was worth. When many people began to default on their mortgage loans, banks and other financial institutions then faced huge losses. The bursting of the price bubble in housing helped to trigger the global economic slowdown that started in 2008. shows how people and firms will react to the incentives provided by these laws to control prices, in ways that will often lead to undesirable costs and consequences. Alternative policy tools can often achieve the desired goals of price control laws, while avoiding at least some of the costs and trade-offs of such laws. Price Ceilings Price controls are laws that the government enacts to regulate prices. Price controls come in two flavors. A price ceiling keeps a price from rising above a certain level, while a price floor keeps a price from falling below a certain level. This section uses the demand and supply framework to analyze price ceilings; the next section turns to price floors. In many markets for goods and services, demanders outnumber suppliers. There are more people who buy bread than companies that make bread; more people who rent apartments than landlords; more people who purchase prescription drugs than companies that manufacture such drugs; more people who buy gasoline than companies that refine and sell gasoline. Consumers, who are also potential voters, sometimes unite behind a political proposal to hold down a certain price. In some cities, for example, renters have pressed political leaders to pass rent control laws, a form of price ceiling that usually works by stating that rents can only be raised by a certain maximum percentage each year. Rent control can become a politically hot topic when rents begin to rise rapidly. Rents might rise for many reasons. Perhaps a change in tastes makes a certain suburb or town a more popular place to live. Perhaps locally based businesses expand, bringing higher incomes and more people into the area. Changes of this sort can cause a change in the demand for rental housing, as illustrated in Exhibit 4-10. The original equilibrium E 0 lies at the intersection of supply curve S 0 and demand curve D 0 , corresponding to an price controls: Government laws to regulate prices. price ceiling: A law that prevents a price from rising above a certain level. price floor: A law that prevents a price from falling below a certain level.

76 Chapter 4 Demand and Supply Price Price (dollars in monthly rent) $900 $800 $700 $600 $500 $400 $300 $200 $100 0 Original Quantity Supplied D 0 D 1 E 0 E 1 Excess demand or shortage from price ceiling 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Quantity (thousands of rental units) Original Quantity Demanded New Quantity Demanded $400 12,000 18,000 23,000 $500 15,000 15,000 19,000 $600 17,000 13,000 17,000 $700 19,000 11,000 15,000 $800 20,000 10,000 14,000 S 0 Price ceiling set here Exhibit 4-10 A Price Ceiling Example—Rent Control The original intersection of demand and supply occurs at E 0 . Demand shifts from D 0 to D 1 . The new equilibrium would be at E 1 —except that a price ceiling prevents the price from rising. Because the price doesn’t change, the quantity supplied remains at 15,000. However, after the change in demand, the quantity demanded rises to 19,000. There is excess demand, also called a shortage. equilibrium price of $500 and an equilibrium quantity of 15,000 units of rental housing. The effect of greater income or a change in tastes is to shift the demand curve for rental housing to the right, as shown by the data in the table and the shift from D 0 to D 1 on the graph. In this market, at the new equilibrium E 1 , the price of a rental unit would rise to $600 and the equilibrium quantity would increase to 17,000 units. Long-time apartment dwellers will dislike these price increases. They may argue, “Why should our rents rise because a lot of newcomers want to move in?” The current apartment-dwellers are also voters, and they may elect local politicians who pass a price ceiling law that limits how much rents can rise. For simplicity, let’s assume that a rent control law is passed to keep the price at the original equilibrium of $500 for a typical apartment. In Exhibit 4-10, the horizontal line at the price of $500 shows the legally fixed maximum price set by the rent control law. However, the underlying forces that shifted the demand curve to the right have not vanished. At that price ceiling, the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied: that is, at a price of $500 the quantity supplied remains at the same 15,000 rental units, but the quantity demanded is 19,000 rental units. Thus, people who would like to rent in this area are knocking on the doors of landlords, searching for apartments. A situation of excess demand, also called a shortage, results when people are willing to pay the market price but cannot purchase (or in this case rent) what they desire. Rent control has been especially popular in wartime and during times of high inflation. New York City, the most prominent U.S. city that has imposed rent control laws for a long period, put rent control in place as a “temporary” measure during World War II. Rent control was also especially popular during the 1970s, when all prices in the U.S. economy were rising rapidly as part of an overall process of inflation. By the mid-1980s, more than 200 American cities, with about 20% of the nation’s population, had rent control laws. But in the last two decades, the political pendulum began swinging